A paper I co-authored with four other colleagues from our research group was accepted as a 10-page full paper at this year’s 14th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL 2012) [1] :). We were notified towards the end of July, 2012 and I was especially impressed with the positive feedback from the three (3) reviewers, regrettably though, the submission was not nominated for the best paper award 🙁

The publication is titled “Bonolo: A General Digital Library System for File-based Collections” [2]. It’s the result of one and half years of collaborative research. The design of the software is based on design principles that form the core of my research, the initial version of the software –the curator and end user Web interfaces– was implemented by two honours students —Stuart Hammar and Miles Robinson— as part of their honurs academic requirement, I worked on the repository sub-layer, and Hussein was principle investigator. However, prior to writing the paper, Kyle Williams and myself did a sprint [3] and extensively made a number of changes to the tool. The performance evaluation and user experience evaluation of the user interface was conducted by Miles and Stuart, but I conducted another online UX study prior to writing the paper. In a nutshell, the overall contribution was as follows.

Hussein

Kyle

Miles

Phiri

Stuart

Background Work

Motivation

X

X

Design Principles

Framework& Principles

X

X

Software

Web Interfaces and
Repository

X

X

X

X

Evaluation

Performace and UX

X

X

X

X

Publication

10 page draft submission

X

X

X

I picked up quite a number of things during the course of the project and got a sense of how collaborative research is conducted.